Drug legalisation is the only way to tackle skunk
Today, I'm in The Times arguing that legalising recreational cannabis is the only policy that can protect young people and deprive violent gangs of control over an unregulated market. You can read the full piece here (register for free to access). Here’s an extract:
Growing up as a teenager in Essex, my friends who used cannabis all smoked skunk. Dealers were often teenagers themselves and never asked for ID. They didn’t know the strength of their product and offered no information on the potential health effects. Some were even robbed at knifepoint after travelling to meet dealers in alleyways to reduce the risk of getting cautioned or arrested by police. Others (especially teenage girls) risked worse when they climbed into strangers’ cars to buy cannabis.
All of these problems could be solved under a legal, properly regulated system.
You can also read former Executive Director Sam Bowman's previous Thunderer piece on the same topic here. If you're interested in joining the push to change our failed system of prohibition then check out Cannabis in the UK: a project of our friends at VolteFace.
Conjectures and Refutations
Today is World Book Day, and my contribution to it is to talk briefly about a book that totally captivated me. It was Karl Popper’s “Conjectures and Refutations,” first published in 1963, but which I first read the 3rd edition of in 1969, and which the author signed for me.
It is Popper’s most readable book, though it sacrifices none of his intellectual force in being accessible to the intelligent lay reader. Popper had earlier solved Hume’s problem of induction in his “Logic of Scientific Discovery,” and this book develops that theme. “We can learn,” says Popper, “from our mistakes.”
Instead of committing ourselves to the ungrounded belief that tomorrow will be like yesterday, we conjecture theories and then test them to see if they hold up under experiment. It is from our creative brains that these conjectures come, as do the experiments that might refute them.
The book is subtitled “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge,” making the case that each of these pieces of “knowledge” is tentative, and might have to be rejected if experiment goes against what it predicted. “Conjectures and Refutations” was not written as a book, but is a compilation of many lectures Popper had given in and around its central theme.
The book is a powerful antidote against all-embracing theories which purport to “deduce” knowledge systematically. No, says Popper, it is more like inspired guesswork coupled with a methodology for exposing and rejecting what doesn’t sit with observed reality.
“What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth, even though it be beyond our reach.”
It is powerful stuff, and beautifully written. It sets out the methodology which has brought us thus far in understanding the universe we inhabit and has enabled us to send our sounding line to the brink of infinity.
George Monbiot's - correct - argument that we shouldn't have national parks
As ever, this isn't quite what George Monbiot thinks he is arguing but it is what he is so. We shouldn't have national parks at all:
Visit any national park in Britain and ask yourself what you are seeing. Is it the “wild”, “unspoilt” landscape the brochures and display boards promised? Or is it eerily bereft of wildlife and rich ecosystems? Is it managed in the interests of the nation or for a tiny, privileged minority? I suspect that if we saw such places called national parks in another country, we would recognise them for what they are: a complete farce.
One of the reasons for this dire state is burning. Much of the land in our national parks is systematically burned, with the blessing of the agencies supposed to protect it. This vandalism is sometimes justified as a “conservation tool”, but it bears as much relationship to the conservation of wildlife as burning libraries bears to the conservation of books. So weird has our engagement with nature in this country become that we can no longer tell the difference between protection and destruction.
On Dartmoor and Exmoor, the national park authorities and the National Trust, charged with protecting the land, instead torch it to favour sheep.
We do not, mean, not at all, that there should be no wild areas. Nor that we don't enjoy, luxury in in fact, that great outdoors ourselves. Rather, that the centralised control of these things will always lead to this sort of result.
This is, again as we've pointed out before, an implication of Mancur Olson's predictions. The State is the manner in which special interest groups fight each other for their share of us and ours. When such centralisation takes place - and the National Trust is as with the national park administrations, really a part of that state these days - then only those significantly and seriously interested in the outcome are going to fight for their desires.
Sure, we can dream that disinterested and impartial civil servants will do what's best but that ain't the way it turns out. The special interests are intensely interested in the deliberations and decisions of those central authorities - thus they strive and all too often succeed in taking them over. Bye bye that disinterest and impartiality then.
Not having the concentration of power into national parks and the National Trust etc would mean that the system would be more difficult to take over. Leaving land to be managed as those who own it wish would equally lead to a wider palette of decisions over what to do with it. It is our very concentration of power in order to exercise it which means that the power is co-opted against our desires.
The answer being don't concentrate the power in the first place. But then the argument that we must abolish the national parks in order to save the environment is always going to be a difficult one to make. Even if it is the one George Monbiot is making if only he knew it.
A worrying move in South Africa to undermine property rights
At the end of last week I went to my favourite South African restaurant and toasted the fact that Jacob Zuma had stepped down as President of the Republic of South Africa earlier this month. It was an exciting moment, I thought that a cloud had passed from the rainbow nation and that brighter times lay ahead. My enthusiasm, it seems, was misplaced.
“The battle for freedom,” wrote Milton Friedman in 1994 as part of his reintroduction to Hayek’s seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, “must be won over and over again.” As depressing as it may seem, that is a sentence that has remained depressingly true.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical left party led by Mugabe wannabe Julius Malema, brought forward a bill that would allow land to be expropriated by the state from white farmers without compensation. It was supported by the governing ANC in the South African parliament. Malema is a man who even the South African Communist Party thought of as too extreme when he brought forward plans to nationalise the country's mines.
In his own words yesterday Malema said he intends to use this change of policy to force a fundamental reform of the economy that will be utterly ruinous for South Africa if he gets the chance:
"There is no motion there saying expropriation of rural land. We're saying expropriation of land without compensation. So the question of urban or rural doesn't arise,"
"Every land in South Africa should be expropriated without compensation and it will be under the state. The state should be the custodian of the land,"
"No one is going to lose his or her house, no one is going to lose his or her flat, no one is going to lose his or her factory or industry. All [that] we are saying is they will not have the ownership of the land,"
But why have the ANC moved? Well, beyond the fact that they’ve calculated losing voters to the DNC will be fewer than the numbers they risk losing to a more hardline EEF, the ANC found that few farmers were signing up to have their assets bought from them below market price under its ‘willing-buyer willing-seller policy’.
But this is just the action of a country far away, the legacy of apartheid, and could never happen here? Wrong. It is the logical conclusion of the thoughts of people like McDonnell and Seamus Milne. In fact, the moves towards these arguments have already been made.
When McDonnell said that he’d be keen to nationalise industry he was quickly rounded on by work done at the Centre for Policy Studies that claimed there was a going to be a high price of £176bn for Labour’s plans. But John had an ace up his sleeve. He repeated a line he used on the Marr show back in November: “it will be parliament who sets the price on any of those nationalisations.” Well it will be parliament that sets the price of expropriation of assets in South Africa, and they will set it at zero.
They are, as Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, “Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve great social changes they envision, they’re anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident in their ability to do so.” But their impatience threatens the very freedoms that are the bedrock of our prosperity under capitalism.
Ownership matters. The ability to own, sell or lease at leisure matters. Free personal choice matters. Property rights “… are the most basic of human rights and an essential foundation for other human rights." As Friedrich von Hayek explained if the state owns all of the property, then it alone has power to decide who does what, when and where. Property is a fundamental for liberty, giving owners self-determination over it and free competition, exchange and wealth creation.
As my old colleague Sam Bowman put it “overriding property rights capriciously undermines the incentive people have to hold off from consuming and invest in their futures instead, because they will be unsure about whether they’ll actually get to enjoy the returns of that investment. This is extremely important in the developing world, where weak or nonexistent property rights preclude capital accumulation and growth.”
South Africa’s move to help its poorest by taking control of assets of richer farmers because of the colour of their skin, in an attempt to redistribute wealth, will end up curtailing the growth rate of the country. It is a move they can ill afford and a lesson they should have learned from the basket case economy in Zimbabwe to their north where fellow expropriator Mugabe has fortunately been removed from power.
Investors shun countries that take control of property from private hands, for obvious reasons. And if you do want to work with companies in those countries there are hefty costs from banks, insurers and other third parties that have to prudently manage their risk. Each deal requires higher scrutiny, more credit checks, more credit committees, more insurance and more due diligence. Obviously it comes with higher risk. This risk means more cost and that hits the poorest countries hardest as it delays and makes rival contracts and rival investments more attractive. In cases like Venezuela and previously in Zimbabwe it meant a complete curtailment of any transactions by reputable institutions, leaving them at the mercy of less scrupulous regimes and companies.
We can ill afford that here, and it should be resisted at all levels. This week South Africa has taken a backward step, it will have scared many that work across borders. Time for them to put their best foot forward and promise to reverse this decision.
The NHS should pay kidney donors
I'm in CapX along with The Niskanen Center's Samuel Hammond arguing that we should that we the NHS should pay kidney donors to eliminate the transplant waiting list and save lives.
"Couples in the UK, where paying egg donors is illegal, often travel to the US for IVF, where paying donors is legal. In many provinces in Canada, paying for blood plasma is illegal, and as a result 80% of Immune Globulin is imported from America, where college students earn money by selling blood plasma. Iran created a regulated market for kidneys in the 1980s, and by 1999 the kidney transplant waitlist was almost entirely clear.
"Kidney donors not only save lives and allow patients to come off dialysis, they also save the NHS money. According to the National Kidney Federation, each kidney transplant saves the NHS over £200,000 by reducing the need for expensive dialysis treatment. That’s significantly more than $40,000 price the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker and his co-author Julio Elias estimated would be necessary to eliminate the kidney shortage altogether.
...
"Then there are those who are simply repulsed by the idea of paying for organs, per se – the strange notion that “commodification” risks a greater abrogation of human dignity than a culture that permits hundreds of avoidable deaths. The tragedy is that paying for organs is inevitable. Either we choose to pay donors directly, or society pays through an utterly predictable loss of life and treasure."
Photo credit: North Dakota National Guard
Why Walkable Cities Enjoy More Freedom
If you happen to visit Egypt and find yourself in the famous Tahrir Square, you might be puzzled: how could this space accommodate two million protesters? In fact, the square looked different at the time of the Arab Spring, up until the new military government ringed its central part with an iron fence. A similar transformation happened with the Pearl roundabout in the capital of Bahrain where demonstrators used to gather — it was turned into a traffic junction. In my hometown, Moscow, the square where millions called for the end of Soviet rule in 1991 now houses an hideous shopping mall.
For a pro-liberty movement to raise its head, Twitter is not enough: face-to-face contact is crucial. That is why when oppressive governments want to destroy civil society, they destroy public spaces. Street markets, green squares and lively parks (think of the iconic Hyde Park corner) are places where citizens meet, negotiate and slowly learn to trust each other. Joseph Stalin knew it well, hence he made sure that city dwellers had no public spaces to socialise in. The results were devastating: chronic mistrust that post-communist societies are yet to overcome. Today, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the levels of social capital in Dresden and Leipzig are still lower than in Munich and Hamburg, which bears its economic as well as political costs.
One study shows that residents living in walkable neighbourhoods exhibit at least 80% greater levels of social capital than those living in car-dependent ones. That is something to consider, given that only a half of Brits know their neighbour’s name. The economic benefits are also clear: improved walking infrastructure can increase retail sales by 30%. London has witnessed it on Oxford Street where the creation of a Tokyo-style pedestrian crossing led to a 25% increase in turnover in the adjacent stores.
In the 20th century, the world has fallen in and out of love with urban utopias. Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” with its enormous avenues and gigantic block houses is probably the most famous (or infamous) proposal — look for gloomy pictures to get an impression on how Paris would look like if his ideas were put to practice (or just imagine Barbican extended to the size of a city). American journalist and one of the founders of modern urban studies, Jane Jacobs, challenged these ideas in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while praising spontaneous order in urban development.
What was common for the socialist urban projects? They glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. In contrast, the most appealing examples Jacobs presented in her book were all neighbourhoods with intense pedestrian flow. Besides boosting community life and helping cities to prosper, she argues, walkable cities are also safer ones. More pedestrians means more “eyes on the streets”, which lowers the need for police surveillance (Britain has almost 6 million CCTVs, one for every 11 people).
That’s all fine, but who pays? It’s true that large-scale urban redevelopment projects can be very expensive. However, engaging with private capital has proven to be a viable strategy both in and outside of the UK. One inspirational example comes from right across the Channel. In Rotterdam, local architects proposed a pedestrian bridge that would link two parts of the city separated by a railroad. When the local government refused to fund it, they launched a public crowdfunding campaign and raised enough money to complete the project. This is a perfect example of how social capital can bridge aspirations and reality — sometimes even literally.
Many citizens are sceptical about large-scale urban projects, and for a reason: the most ambitious of them are being implemented in a top-down-way. Take Barcelona’s car-free ”superblocks” or Paris' mayor’s pledge to halve the number of private cars — both faced strong opposition from residents. Back in the sixties, Jacobs warned against one-size-fits all solutions. In one of her public speeches she pointed to the corner grocery store as a sign of commercial diversity in a city — and soon began to receive projects where planners literally allocated slots for corner grocery stores. Such “patronising conception”, she argues, is not something a modern city needs.
Of course, there will always be NIMBYs (“Not In My Backyard”) opposing any changes to the city landscape but YIMBY is the new black. Few years ago, when I was serving as an elected official in Moscow, I was the only outspoken YIMBY in my district. Once at the public hearings I was even accused of being bribed by the developer — just because I supported a private park project! Here, once again, we face the problem of trust, and it is hard to blame people for being distrustful when social ties are so weak. This vicious circle — no public spaces so no social capital, no social capital so no public spaces — should be finally broken.
Vera Kichanova is a recipient of the John Blundell Studentship. She was the first Russian libertarian to be elected to public office and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation on market urbanism at King's College London.
Mary Shelley gets a plaque, why not David Ricardo?
This is something we've mentioned before as a desire but never quite been able to manage ourselves, given the plethora of things which can be attempted. But this story about Mary Shelley raises again the subject:
This year marks the bicentenary of the publication of that book, Frankenstein – famous in its day and ever since, interpreted in art, film, comics, ballet and music. The almost forgotten link between its creation and the city of Bath will be marked for the first time by a plaque to be unveiled on Tuesday.
Mary Godwin – child of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 10 days after her daughter’s birth, and the radical writer and campaigner William Godwin – wrote much of the book during months living in Bath while her life was scarred by traumatic events.
Bath being the sort of place where such things happened at the time. It's still entirely possible to walk past Nelson's house he had when a middle ranking officer, sidle by the one he had when richer and cross the road to the pub above which he earlier recovered from losing his arm for example. No more than 100 yards between the three.
Frankenstein was indeed a seminal work in the development of the novel and why not celebrate it with a plaque? But this brings us to our own little bonnet bee.
David Ricardo reading Adam Smith (in 1809 if memory serves) was also an epochal moment. We've no doubt that comparative advantage, the laws of rent and so on would have been explained by someone at some time but Ricardo has changed the world and very much for the better too. We also know that he read Smith while on holiday in Bath. What we don't know is in which house.
That is something though which it should be possible to discover. We've mentioned this before but never quite pursued the answer properly. We'd be very interested if someone did. We'd most certainly join forces to petition for a plaque when it is all worked out.
We even know, because we've met them at one of our dos, one of Ricardo's descendants, one who has the desk at which he wrote his seminal work. They would make a jolly addition to the unveiling, wouldn't they?
The Continental Telegraph
There’s a new kid on the block. It’s a site called The Continental Telegraph.
Tim Worstall of this parish took the initiative in setting it up, and it’s already
drawing thousands of readers. This is not surprising because it features short,
punchy stories on a variety of hot news topics. It’s well worth a look. Indeed, it
can be quite addictive. Check it out here to get a new take in what’s happening.
But you don’t have to eat fewer hot cross buns…
Regulation means dead ponies
It's a general theme around here that not all aspects of life need to be subject to government regulation. In fact, that large parts of life work very much better free of such burdens. It might be possible to describe this as the non-Germanic approach - we do not need rules for everything.
One point that perhaps gains less recognition than it should is that it isn't just government imposition which is the problem, it is that attempt to regulate itself often enough. As with the Exmoor ponies:
Exmoor ponies are being culled by farmers because of delays in obtaining “passports” that prove their pedigree.
The animals are listed as endangered by the Rare Breed Survival Trust and require the paperwork from the Exmoor Pony Society in order to be sold.
But breeders, who largely keep them simply to ensure their survival, have claimed that they are having to wait months for the documents to be issued due to bureaucratic red tape and cannot afford to keep the ponies for that long.
This is not to castigate the penpushers it is simply to point to the end result.
Sure, Exmoor ponies are special, we, along with many others, are entirely happy with the idea that they therefore be specially treated. But look at what the end result here is. Exactly the system built to ensure that specialness is what ends up with some of them being shot. Not for any reason other than that the regulation itself places a bottleneck across the normally free flowing market.
It's undoubtedly true that certain regulations are worth more than their cost. It's also undoubtedly true that some are worth less. Our contention is only that we're currently at the point where much of the regulation we have is in that second class and should thus be headed for the slaughterhouse. You know, so that rather fewer ponies do.
Is this genius or crass stupidity?
Deborah Doane used to run the World Development Movement, one of the more crassly foolish of the development NGOs. You know the sort of thing, we must all smash capitalism so that the poor can never become rich like wot we all did. So foolish that they had to change their name to Global Justice Now once enough people caught on.
It should be said that this proposal from her could be complete genius though it does rather depend upon which side you're on here:
From solidarity comes a need to reimagine ownership and accountability. In effect, NGOs are owned by their donors in the global north. A more networked organisation, made up of community-owned groups or co-operatives, could produce a model of mutual delivery, with accountability emerging from the bottom up, not the top down.
In the current model, accountability is about how much food was distributed, or how many girls were educated, to prove value for money to donors. A new model would redefine success – and be based on capacity, empowerment and voice.
In effect stop insisting that the billions upon billions that flow through the aid system and those NGOs actually achieve anything and instead measure by Teh Feelz. If more angry people complain about capitalism then that's the job done.
A cursory think through this shows that it is crass stupidity. After all, we really do want the poor to get rich and we should be measuring how well our aid achieves this so that we can do more of what works, less of what doesn't.
A more detailed think through shows that it is, from Doane's and similar viewpoint, actually an idea of genius. For if what you actually want is billions upon billions to whine about capitalism with no accountability at all then isn't this just what you would desire? Billions upon billions to whine about capitalism with no accountability at all?
Of course, we should tell Doane and all who sail in her idea to go boil their heads but it is still a clever play for our money, isn't it?